Fanfare for National Public Radio

Aaron Copland died on Dec. 2, 1990.
 
We were driving north from Florida to New York on one of those all-nighters we used to pull.
 
As we drove through coastal Georgia and South Carolina, we listened to works by the great American composer, plus critiques of his career.
 
Past Brunswick, past Savannah, past Charleston, the radio played ballet scores like "Billy the Kid" and "Rodeo" and "Appalachian Spring" as well as concert pieces like "El Salón Mexico" and "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait."
 
When one station crackled out, just a slight adjustment produced another station, somewhere from 88 to 91 on the FM dial. All that evening, we scarcely missed a note of Copland’s musical references to cowboys and immigrants and martyred heroes.
 
We were connected to the culture of our entire country, not just Big Town but all the places where classical music touches the heart, the brain, the soul.
 
I count 17 NPR stations in Georgia and eight in South Carolina.  
 
We know this country well enough to realize that it’s not all political bombast and preachers and country music and rock. As we drove north, in the regional cities and small towns and way out in the counties, people were driving or reading or even falling asleep to the work of the master from Boys High in Brooklyn, who never attended college but instead composed music. 
 
This synchronized symphony along Interstate 95 was no accident. It came through a chain of National Public Radio stations, bringing classical music and news and features to all the people and subsidized in part by tax money, via public officials who have recognized, over the years, that pipers (and composers) must be paid.
 
Now National Public Radio is under siege, its subsidies threatened. The new regime seems to regard enlightened talk and classical music to be frivolous, even seditious.
 
In New York, we read that subsidies by wealthy and middle class patrons may keep our two radio stations going.

This means we can count on Brian Lehrer switching intellectual gears every weekday morning on WNYC-FM; we can expect Terrance McKnight to keep on playing his eclectic swath of classical music on WQXR-FM.
 
We’ll be all right. But in so many other places, the high end of talk and music is threatened.

There are worse things, more dangerous things, worth hectoring your local member of Congress.  But In the midst of all the other causes, people need to stand up for National Public Radio, all over this land.

Not by Accident